Simulmedia: Series Premiere Attentiveness and Program Loyalty - Stewart Hauser - MediaBizBloggers

Close analysis of how people watch a program39s series premiere reveals that viewers39 likelihood of returning to future episodes follows from their attentiveness to the first As television networks seek additional commercial vehicles to engage viewers and advertisers amp8211 think of the sponsorship model favored by PBS and championed by Rainbow Media the link between attentiveness and loyalty increases in importanceAttentiveness and loyalty to a program are positively correlated as explained in an early blog post Viewers who enjoy a show will watch a large number of minutes in a given episode and then return for future episodes while viewers who do not enjoy the show will exhibit low attentiveness when they are watching it and will likely not return for additional episodesOne interesting consequence of the relationship between attentiveness and loyalty is that the future viewing behavior of an important segment of a show39s viewers can be predicted by simply analyzing data from a single episode such as the series premiere Viewers of the series premiere will return for a predictable number of future episodes based on their attentiveness to the premiere This information could be used by advertising sales teams looking to sell sponsorships based on expected future ratingsTo further investigate these ideas we selected several new programs on broadcast networks and divided viewers of the series premieres into groups based on the number of minutes of the premiere that they watched For each of these series premiere attentiveness groups we looked at the number of additional episodes watched during the season The results support the original hypothesis of a positive correlation between attentiveness and program loyalty The results were fairly constant across programs and are shown for one program in the graph belowViewers who watch only a small portion of the series premiere are far more likely than other series premiere viewers to tune in to zero additional episodes during the season Viewers who watch a large percentage of the series premiere on the other hand are much more likely than other series premiere viewers to return for a large number of additional episodes The graphs below combine data from the several programs to summarize these observationsOne key variable to consider is the relative distribution of low medium and high attentiveness viewers within a series premiere or other episode In the programs analyzed viewers qualified for the highest attentiveness category if they watched 4260 minutes of the hourlong premiere On average around 55 of series premiere viewers were placed in this category If a certain series premiere yields a high attentiveness group that is significantly larger or smaller than the 55 baseline that we have found marketers and advertising sales teams might choose to act accordingly A very large high attentiveness group for example would suggest that viewers will be unusually loyal to the program which might mean that fewer promotions need to be runWhat is still unclear is whether marketing should be targeted toward highattentiveness viewers or lowattentiveness viewers Are the highattentiveness viewers going to tune in to future episodes regardless of promotion If so perhaps the lowattentiveness viewers would be a better target Further study would help clarify these questionsData based on a nationallyprojectable DIRECTV dataset from TNS Media Research39s InfoSys data productStewart can be reached at stewartsimulmediacomRead all Stewart39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Simulmedia MediaBizBloggersFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBlogger

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Simulmedia: Series Premiere Attentiveness and Program Loyalty - Stewart Hauser - MediaBizBloggers

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Simulmedia: Series Premiere Attentiveness and Program Loyalty - Stewart Hauser - MediaBizBloggers

Stewart Hauser

Empowering Women in Media: Insights from Industry Leaders (Video) - By E.B. Moss

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